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Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.